How I hate Social Selling

You can’t take Personal out of Social when you complete a sale. You just cannot!

I hate Social Selling. I hate the term. I loath that it’s a buzzword. I want to kill a squirrel every time someone says it. Good day everyone!

Okay, fine. I am not leaving it there. Let me explain….

I am a Mad Men fan. I am that fan that has Don Draper’s illustration on my “Profile Picture” album on Facebook. No judgements, please.

May be one of things that has attracted me to the show was how Don and Pete treated their clients. The social events they went on for the sake of business. How Account Execs bend over backwards to get or maintain business with a brand/person.

You’d get the same treatment nowadays, in real life, if you had somewhat of a purchasing position. Sales managers will be offering you expensive dinners left and right. They will sell you smiles before they even talk about their products. That’s sales. Cozy up. Get to know your client. Share laughs. Everyone loves a laugh.

No matter how many times I ask myself the question, “How can one be a better salesman?,” the answer has always been “How social can you get?” And it’s not Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn I mean here. It’s how well can you connect with a prospective client? It’s how you define common grounds between you two and start moving on them. It’s how much you actually care about your client.

The social connection between a seller and a buyer is not a new concept. May be that’s why we used to call it “personal selling”. There has to be a personal connection between the two. But isn’t personal social as well?

Selling has always been social. I don’t know why, just because we have technology now, we have to treat it differently.

If you look up Social Selling, you will find that its only different by the amount of information available for a salesperson to connect with a buyer. The depth of details about a person/business is staggering. It makes a salesman life a whole lot easier.

Social Selling allows you to find who to call by providing complete and accurate contact data and identifying connections within your social networks. It lets you know what to say by supplying a useful some of key events at the business you are reaching or in the buyer’s life. And to complete the social circle, it provides means to follow a buyer through social channels.

So, in other words, Social Selling is Personal Selling guided by Big Data and Technology to connect to the right people and win big.

Now is the time where I say that my beef isn’t with the concept. I actually love the concept! I do have a problem with the name, though. Social Selling makes Personal Selling sound isolated and irrelevant in today’s world. At least that’s how it made me feel first. But let’s be clear, without Personal Selling, Social Selling is merely a useless flow of too much information.

I decided to write this post as a tribute to all the great salesmen I know. They’ve excelled way before they had InsideView and DiscoverOrg. With these technologies at their disposal now, sit back and look at them replacing stars and shining over their companies’ success.